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At issue is the final environmental analysis, which found that in most scenarios, the oil pipeline posed little risk of exacerbating climate change, increasing the chances that President Barack Obama may ultimately approve the Canada-to-Texas project.

Pipeline opponents contend the State Department has brushed aside their concerns that the contractor, Environmental Resources Management, was too closely aligned with the oil industry to fairly judge the risks — and that the department itself has failed to properly vet the company.

“There is no smoking gun, but there are a lot of things that we know are true,” Doug Hayes, an attorney at Sierra Club who has been involved in litigation forcing the State Department to disclose internal documents about its Keystone review. What activists have uncovered raises “serious questions about the integrity of the environmental review” that should give Secretary of State John Kerry and Obama more to consider, he said.

“They have everything before them to reject this pipeline,” Hayes said.

But the State Department rejected charges that it hasn’t properly vetted ERM.

An official said in an email that the department’s “guidance on conflicts of interest for third-party contractors is the strongest of any U.S. government agency. That guidance was applied rigorously and effectively in determining that ERM did not have a conflict of interest. We are confident that no conflicts of interest between ERM and TransCanada exist.”

Anti-Keystone activists are hoping a soon-to-be-released report from State’s inspector general on their conflict-of-interest allegations will provide some validation. But they may be in for a disappointment.

Citing unnamed sources, The Washington Post reported Friday that a draft version of the report “suggests the agency examine its conflict-of-interest process but does not find that State Department officials violated agency rules in retaining” ERM.

The IG’s office declined to comment on the Post story and would not provide details on the upcoming report, which it said would be released in “early 2014.”

Greens may also be frustrated by the scope of the report. Officials have characterized it as a “limited compliance follow-up review” of a February 2012 investigation that found no evidence of a conflict of interest or bias in the department’s analysis of the pipeline.

The 2012 report largely dismissed allegations that activists had lobbed at Cardno Entrix, a previous third-party contractor that worked on a separate environmental analysis of the pipeline.

But the report did find several potential flaws in State’s selection process for third-party contractors. State did not independently verify the contractor’s conflict-of-interest disclosures, the report said. And it recommended the department improve its “organizational conflicts of interest screening process” and exert more control over the contractor review.

Two years later, anti-Keystone activists say the State Department still hasn’t done enough to verify ERM’s assertions that it had no conflict of interest in conducting the latest environmental analysis of the pipeline.

Documents obtained by the Sierra Club through a Freedom of Information Act request indicate that the State Department did take steps in response to the IG’s 2012 recommendations. But the pipeline opponents still maintain there’s no evidence that the department has independently verified ERM’s claims, as the inspector general recommended.

One May 2013 internal State Department document shared with POLITICO says State required ERM to “conduct an internal inquiry to ensure that it was free of any conflicts of interest” regarding the pipeline. ERM has “certified that it has not had, and does not have, any contracts with” Keystone developer TransCanada, says the document, which outlines guidance on how to respond to press inquiries about the conflict-of-interest allegations.

In a document from August 2012, the department said it had taken several steps in response to the 2012 IG report, and it had “maximized” the department’s control of the contractor selection process. State required contractors to submit conflict of interest disclosure forms as well as a “detailed description of their internal processes for determining potential conflicts,” which were then reviewed by State Department lawyers, the document said.

But that’s not enough, according to activists who say the documents indicate the State Department has taken ERM’s word at face value rather than thoroughly verifying their claims.

“It baffles me that they simply just repeated the same mistakes from the first round,” said Sierra Club’s Hayes.

“It’s pretty appalling,” Ross Hammond, senior campaigner with the anti-Keystone environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth. “I haven’t seen any evidence that they did any independent verification.”

He said Friends of the Earth and Sierra Club will soon send a letter to the State IG expressing their concerns about ERM’s “misrepresentations and the apparent lack of any attempt by State to independently verify ERM’s claims.”

If State had worked to verify ERM’s statements, it would have come upon several issues that anti-Keystone activists have uncovered and that were subsequently trumpeted in the press, Hammond said.